Stamina by Colleen Fitzgerald

Issue 134

Colleen Fitzgerald’s series Stamina provides new approaches to conventional subjects by utilizing the materials and tools of photography in non-traditional ways. She uses unique physical processes, including an intricate in-camera technique of her creation, to combine aspects of sculpture and photography. The resulting work subverts the idealized two-dimensional photograph and provides a new entry point to the enduring subjects of natural landscapes and seascapes.

The series is a transformative collaboration with nature that allows for elements of chance. To create the images, unexposed large sheets of positive film are cut and formed into three-dimensional shapes before being exposed inside a camera outfitted with a custom film holder that accepts the film as a three-dimensional object instead of as a standard, flat sheet. The land and seascapes exposed on the shaped film can appear stretched and distorted. Once the film is developed, it is re-photographed on a lightbox and printed. Sheets of film are at times shaped after exposure. The final product of the landscapes pictured in these ways contain unique physical gestures and seem as unusual as they are familiar.

The folded, curved, cut, and overlapping sheets of transparency film create an immediate awareness of the materiality of the photograph. This heightened experience reminds the viewer they are not looking at the landscape itself, but a construction of it arranged by the artist’s hand. In some pieces, different views of the same sheet of shaped film are exhibited together, providing multiple, shifting perspectives from a single exposure. Overall, Fitzgerald’s processes reconstruct both reality and the very material that records reality. In doing so, Stamina is not a direct representation of the world, but a negotiation of vision.

Colleen Fitzgerald lives and works in Massachusetts, USA.
To view more of Colleen’s work, please visit her website.